Friday, 17 October 2008

Universities exploring Service Design

Following on from the previous post, here are some Universities I know of exploring, researching and/or teaching (usually as a subject) Service Design. To date, there is no running course in Service Design (but I am aware there are definitely some on the cards shortly).

Northumbria University (UK)In 2006, Northumbria University held the first Service Design conference called ISDN (International Service Design Northumbria). Since 2006 the University has held 2 other conferences around Service Design, one later in 2006 and the most recent, this year in April (download presentations and listen to podcasts here). I am currently doing my PhD research out of Northumbria and 2 other peers of mine are also exploring PhDs with strong Service Design themes.

Birmingham City University (UK)Birmingham City University’s Service by Design programme is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and seeks to raise awareness of Service Design in SMEs both in the private and public sectors. The SbD programme does this by developing their academics as “Innovation Managers” to work with SMEs. In September, SbD held a Dissemination Event explaining the progamme, experiences, learnings and results. You can download a presentation file of the event here.

Imagination Lancaster (UK)Imagination Lancaster is a research lab situatated at Lancsaster University. One of the lab’s focal areas is Service Design undertaking research and projects into service design models, processes, evaluation and tools. See details here.

Carnegie Mellon University (USA)Since 2004, CMU has taught and been involved in Service Design. CMU have also hosted conferences called Emergence in 2006 and 2007 exploring the boundaries of Service Design. Their next conference will be in 2009.Having worked with CMU design graduates before, I am quite familiar with their robust user-centered design methodology applicable to both products and services.

Linköping University (Sweeden)The University is currently undertaking projects around developing design techniques for service development, projects in healthcare, IT and learning labs for innovation. More details here.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hi, I would also add Aalborg University, School of Architecture and Design. We have been teaching design of Product Service Systems for about 7 years now, as a part of the Master in industrial design. Some of the outcome of this activity and some research, methodological and strategic results of our research is available at the wiki servicedesign.wikispaces.com

I would also like to mention The University of the West of England. The head of the technology department is extremely passionate about Service Design and very nurturing of students whose projects are in this field. They have very progressive teaching methods and as a result a number of us have been very successful with the services we designed since graduation.

I still believe there is a huge gap in education here in the UK for service design. I also feel a lot of this is down to service design itself; it's methodologies and practices are still not fully understood by everyone. And many design students are still better equipped to consider the aesthetics of products in terms of engineering processes, much like some individuals (service designers) are better suited to solving human needs through storytelling and mapping out the world around them.